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Giving Creates Success

Your true feeling of success will only come from what you give to the world through your work and love. Entertainment is based on what you can get from the world.

That explains why people who don’t worry about what they’re going to get are the ones who always seem to get the good stuff. And those who come to get something wonder why they can’t obtain it. They wonder why life always feels so unfair.

The hands-off manager models, inspires and nurtures this giving approach. He or she mentors contribution. When you take your hands off people’s lives and let them give what they’ve got, you’ll be allowing them to succeed. They will look to see what’s inside them and they will look to see how they can give that to the world.

I like the idea of Giving creating Success. Most sensible humans will be glad to help you out when asked. Would you open your purse when an appeal is made to you for a noble cause? I certainly will. Steve Chandler & Duane Black in ‘The Hands-off Manager‘ drive this idea. “We can allow the results to emerge in the world outside of us if we take care of this world inside. And there’s so much less stress”

Creating Results: The Benefits of Hands-Off Management

Duane Black has seen company after company in the home-building business focus only on their percentage of profit in every final sale. That’s what they think about all day long because that’s what they think they’re in business for and how they’ll be successful.

Every one of them had their profit margins decline over the years, because all they focused on was the end result. So they found themselves in an ever more competitive environment delivering an average level of product, an average level of customer service and an average level of community and environmental involvement. But customers don’t want to pay a premium for “average.” Customers don’t get excited about “average.”

So these companies ended up not making big margins. Soon they had to do bigger volume to try to offset their mediocre product. And their volume negatively affected their quality, so the spiral went downward and it wasn’t long before they were in real trouble. That’s the tragedy of the outside focus.

Duane’s many years in the highly successful SunCor Development Company have been characterized by the company’s inside focus. SunCor decided long ago not to obsess on volume of sales. They trust that volume will occur naturally; they let volume show up when volume is appropriate.

They’re more focused each day on perfecting the inner system that will create great communities and phenomenal land planning. For example, they insist on always having really good architecture, they don’t build unless they have great locations and they always have a staff of people who love what they do and are aligned with it and therefore are naturally, effortlessly committed to doing a great job.

Duane doesn’t want his people to have an attachment to results so that not getting them will make them feel discouraged. Instead, he trusts the universe to reward the inside game. It’s a process of being who you want to be right now, instead of straining to reach a future goal.

The absence of stressful external goals and never focusing on how many houses they were going to sell to accomplish this level of success – they had the ingredients of success built in. It was an inner process they committed to, followed through on and delivered.

SunCor’s enduring desire was to build a quality product and to provide good customer service. The other goals – the goals of result, the goals of success – weren’t needed. Things occur naturally from the inner desire of who we were going to be.

We can allow the results to emerge in the world outside of us if we take care of this world inside. And there’s so much less stress. You never need be disappointed when you have a “down month” in results. Down months happen. There’s nothing wrong with them. But if your quality of work keeps evolving upward, better and better results over the long run will show up.

What gets measured ;gets done

I had a very enriching session yesterday with a business consultant from Price WaterHouse Coopers France: Jacques Lesieur. He shared with the participants of the seminar his expertise on Balanced Score Card focused on Small & medium entreprises.

The saying “what gets measured, gets done” has never been more relevant. Today, leaders are using measures to drive performance.

With the right measures in the right places, you not only get a picture of performance that is concise, accurate, and current but a tool that can be used to achieve strategic goals, provide targeted direction, align efforts, sustain performance improvement, guide shifts in directions, and achieve balanced results. By deploying a linked measurement system like our Performance Scorecards, you can identify at a glance what is most important and how you are expected to contribute to success.

Defining the “right” measures is critical. Performance Scorecards allow you great flexibility in defining the key result areas to be measured.

Performance Scorecards can be linked vertically to help managers focus on strategic priorities and corporate profitability and growth. They align with the top-level vision and mission, core values and passions, key results areas and key indicators. Cross-functional teams can use linked scorecards to see their processes end-to-end and evaluate whether they deliver the right outcomes for internal and external customers.

Scorecard Management Cycle

The Performance Scorecard Management Cycle defines a six-phase approach for creating and linking scorecards:

 

  • Phase 1: Collecting. Gather inputs that define the “right” measures—such as strategic goals, senior-level measures, and business objectives; plus work team outcomes, core processes, customers’ expectations, and supplier requirements.
  • Phase 2: Creating. Design the scorecard to support key result areas that define the “right” measures for promoting desired outcomes.
  • Phase 3: Cultivating. Conduct reviews with the scorecard to improve performance, and refine objectives to be more relevant and results-oriented.
  • Phase 4: Cascading. Establish workgroup scorecards, aligning objectives and measures company-wide, and define management measures that link executive scorecards with front-line processes.
  • Phase 5: Connecting. Use feedback to drive improvements with individual performance plans that are tied to team objectives and measures—thereby achieving results that support goals.
  • Phase 6: Confirming. Determine whether or not the “right” measures, the “right” number of measures, and the “right” relationships among measures exist to clean out obsolete measures and reduce reports that add no value.

For further reading & study on the subject, I would advise “The Strategy Focus Organisation” of Kaplan & Norton. Note that the same processes may well be used in other fields outside the business world.Being familiar with the subject I was suggested last week to my Champlain to use this methodology to our Parish.

What Is Our Business?

Just like Maximillen Brabec with whom I spent an insipiring day a fortnight ago, Peter Drucker, always seek a reply to the prime question: What is our Business?
I was pleased to read through again the legacy article written by Business Guru Drucker only a year before he left us in November 2005.

Answering the question, What is our business? is the first responsibility of leaders. That business purpose and mission are so rarely given adequate thought is the single most important cause of business frustration and failure. In outstanding businesses, success rests largely on raising the question, What is our business? clearly and deliberately, and on answering it thoughtfully and thoroughly.

With respect to the definition of business purpose and mission, there is only one focus and starting point—the customer. The customer defines the business. A business is not defined by the company´s name, statutes, or articles of incorporation. It is defined by whether customers are satisfied when they buy a product or service. To satisfy customers is the mission and purpose of every business. The question, What is our business? can be answered only by looking at the business from the outside, from the point of view of customer and market. Customers are only interested in their own values, wants, and reality. So, any serious attempt to state “what our business is” must start with the customers´ realities, situation, behavior, expectations, and values.

 

Who is the consumer? is the first and most critical question to be asked in defining business purpose and mission. It is not an easy or obvious question. How it is answered determines, in large measure, how the business defines itself. The consumer—the ultimate user of a product or a service—is always a customer. Each customer defines a different business, has different expectations and values, and buys something different.

It is also important to ask, Where is the customer? and What does the customer buy? If they ask the question at all, most managers only ask What is our business? when the company is in trouble. Of course, then it must be asked. And then asking the question may, indeed, have spectacular results and may even reverse what seams to be irreversible decline. But the question should be asked at the inception of a business—particularly for a business that has ambitions to grow. The most important time to ask seriously, ‘What is our business?’ is when a company has been successful. Success always makes obsolete the very behavior that achieved it. It always creates its own and different problems.

It is not easy for managers of a successful company to ask, What is our business? because everybody thinks that the answer is obvious. It is never popular to argue with success. But sooner or later, even the most successful answer to the question, What is our business? becomes obsolete. Few definitions of the purpose and mission of a business have a life expectancy of more than 10 years.

In asking, What is our business? managers also need to add, And what will it be? What changes are likely to have high impact on the characteristics, mission, and purpose of our business? And how do we now build these anticipations into our concept of the business—into its objectives, strategies, and work assignments?

Again the starting point is the market, its potential and trends. How large a market can we project for our business in 10 years—assuming no basic changes in customers, market structures, or technology? And, what factors could validate or disprove those projections?

The most important trend is one to which few businesses pay much attention: changes in population structure and dynamics. Populations used to change very slowly, except as a result of catastrophic events. Today, however, populations change drastically, affecting buying power and habits, and the size and structure of the workforce. Population shifts are the only events regarding the future for which true prediction is possible.

Management needs to anticipate changes in market structure resulting from changes in the economy, from changes in fashion or taste, and from moves by competition. And competition must always be defined according to the customer´s concept of what product or service he buys, and thus must include indirect as well as direct competition.

Management has to ask which of the consumer´s wants are not adequately satisfied by the products or services offered him today. The ability to ask this question and to answer it correctly usually makes the difference between a growth company and one that depends on the rising tide of the economy for its development. Whoever is content to rise with the tide will also fall with it.

Asking What will our business be? aims at adaptation to anticipated changes. It aims at modifying, extending, and developing the existing business. But there is need also to ask, What should our business be? What opportunities are opening up? What might we create to fulfill the purpose and mission of the business by making it into a different business? Businesses that fail to ask this question are likely to miss opportunity.

Just as important as the decision on what new and different things to do is planned, systematic abandonment of the old that no longer fits the purpose and mission of the business, no longer conveys satisfaction to customers, no longer makes a superior contribution.

A key to deciding what our business is, what is will be, and what it should be is systematic analysis of all existing products, services, processes, markets, uses, and distribution channels. Are they viable? Will they remain viable? Do they still give value to the customer? Do they still fit the realities of population and markets, of technology and economy? If not, how can we best abandon them—or at least stop pouring in further resources and efforts? Unless managers address these questions seriously and act on the answers to them, the best definition of “what our business is, will be, and should be,” will remain a pious platitude. Energy will be used up in defending yesterday. No one will have the time, resources, or will to work on exploiting today or making tomorrow.

Defining the purpose and mission of the business is difficult, painful, and risky. But it alone enables a business to set objectives, develop strategies, concentrate its resources, and to be managed for performance.

Building Rapport

The first lesson of my NLP seminar with John Seymour was entitled Building Rapport. In any human interactions, building and maintaining Rapport is the first action. To be able to exchange or converse with an interlocutor in the best way, one has to develop excellent communication skills. Is it more important to be a good sender of information or receiver? It is just as critical to listen as to speak. Is there an art to being a good listener? Yes. Does it come naturally? I think not. In fact, research indicates that we hear half of what is said, listen to half of what we hear, understand half of it, believe half of that, and remember only half of that.

Patti Hathaway in her book “the change Agent” quotes an old Chinese proverb: “From listening comes wisdom and from speaking repentance.” Her writings inspired me in this blog.

How important are the nonverbal aspects compared to the actual words we use when communicating? Your words are about 7 percent of your communication, tone of voice 38 percent, and body language about 55 percent, and yet, most communication training centers on the use of words.

Often we fake attention because our thought-to-speech ratio. We can think five times faster that the other person talking. Now you can do something productive with that extra lag time in your thought-to-speech ratio.

Tom Peters notes: “Good listeners get out from behind their desk to where the customers are.” Do you give your full attention to the people who talk to you? If not, learn a powerful, technique that will improve your listening and help you gain rapport with anyone you meet. This technique comes from the science of neuro linguistics programming, developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler. By incorporating NLP into the way we work with people, we can “read” people more sensitively, establish a positive relationship more quickly, and respond to them more effectively.

NLP offers a myriad of techniques to improve our ablities to become a better communicator. Mirroring is one example. We tend to like people who are like us. If we look like someone (and 93 percent of who that person is, is nonverbal), they will subconsciously say to themselves, “I like this person. They are just like me.” And, if we like someone, we trust them and want to do business with them. Think about the potential this has for promotions, building business, and building relationships and friendships.

Specifically, this is how you mirror: First, match the other person’s voice tone or tempo. If they talk fast, you talk fast. If they talk slowly, you talk slowly. When I speak in New York, I can’t speak quickly enough. If I’m in southern Texas, I slow my pace down to match their pace. One way to help you match the other person’s tempo is to match the other person’s breathing rate. Pace yourself to it. Match the other person’s body movements, posture, and gestures. If the person you’re mirroring crosses his or her legs, you cross your legs. If the other person gestures, you gesture. Of course, subtlety is everything. You may want to wait several seconds before moving.

The process of mirroring is natural. You do it naturally with people you like and have built rapport with.

Contended Cows

Bill Catlette authored the book “Contented Cows give better milk” and in 2007 a new book: “Contented Cows MOOved faster.” What would you expect from a guy with such a name? Bill did not have to stretch his imagination to find a metaphor to support his stories and teachings to his audience on the very touchy subject of maintaining the work force and reduce employee’s turnovers in this era of employability. I almost fell out of my chair when I read the author’s name of the summary of his first book.

The 12 point ideas you can turn into action that I have retained from the “Contented cows”could be very helpful if you want better milk from your contended cows:

  1. You will be surprised to figure out the cost of employee turnover? All told the cost of a replacement could be worth 150% of a person’s annual salary.

2. Identify an exemplary competitor. It makes sense that employers in your industry face challenges similar to yours. Filter for things like compensation and frilly-fad perks, and focus on leadership and other workplace practices that withstand the test of time.

3. The next time an employee attends any kind of training, ask them ahead of time to be prepared to tell you three new concepts or skills they learned from it, and one thing they will begin doing differently as a result. Don’t approach it like a grilling, but emphasize the need to transform learning into performance, and your desire to support them in their development.

4. Identify a major business challenge or opportunity in your company (declining sales, changing customer demands, new government regulation, emerging markets, or hey, even employee turnover), and invite people to form a task force to help you tackle the issue. Make sure the task force takes ownership for finding solutions. Then reward them (with real money) for results that make it to the bottom line.

5. Go do someone else’s job for a day. On a recent Southwest Airlines flight, I noticed a “flight attendant”, slightly older than the rest, and out of uniform. Turns out he was a pilot. That day, from coast to coast, he cheerfully went up and down the aisle dispensing peanuts, smiles, and a great attitude about the lessons learned from those he called “the people who really keep this plane in the air“.

6. Sit on the footlocker. Major General Melvin Zais, Commander of the 101st Airborne Division in Viet Nam, circa 1968, once said in a speech to future officers, “If you’ll get out of your warm house and go down to the barracks…and just sit on the footlocker…you don’t have to tell ’em they’re doing a great job. Just sit on the footlocker and talk to one or two soldiers and leave. They’ll know that you know that they’re working hard to make you look good.

7. Conduct a survey. Go out there right now and find out how you’re doing in the morale department. If you’ve waited for the appearance of a dark cloud over your place of business, or if your fears of defections leave you feeling like the chair of the Republican party, you’re too late. Regularly (and formally) assess employee attitudes, morale, and perceptions of the work environment through the use of a survey. Feed the results back to everyone (as in, everyone) within one month.

8. On the premise that great places to work start with great people (kinda like baking a cake, isn’t it?), start measuring, managing, and rewarding each manager’s hiring performance over time. This IS part of your business metrics isn’t it? (If all you’ve got to say is “we measure employee turnover,” then, to borrow an expression from a currently popular game show, “You’re the weakest link. Good bye.”) Ditto if that portion of a manager’s bonus potential tied to quality of hiring is less than 25% of the aggregate.

9. Identify one person on your team who seems to be bored – underchallenged in their work. Ask them to develop an idea for a meaningful project they would like to work on. Involve them in as much of the detail as possible. Ask them to develop a budget, identify resources, timelines, and expected outcomes, and then get out of their way.

10. Show peoples the fruits of their labor. Find a meaningful way to show people how the product they make, service they support, or work they do is actually used, and enjoyed, by your customers. One company we work with meets this challenge with field trips. Yes, field trips. Like when you were in school. They make highly technical medical supplies. You know, tubes, valves, that kind of thing. The work is tedious, painstaking, and, well, boring.

The first step in combating complacency was to build some task variety into the job. Then, the plant manager started arranging tours of a nearby hospital, where the assembly workers could see their products at work, saving lives, and delivering drugs and pain relief to patients.

The assembly workers came back so excited that the office staff wanted to be a part of it too, so they chartered a bus for themselves. Now, everyone in the plant makes a couple of trips a year, to keep reinforcing the message, “What we do here is important.”

11. Engage a promising employee in a well-structured career development plan. Learn about their career aspirations and aptitudes, then explore available directions and opportunities. Involve them in a plan to begin taking concrete steps toward achieving that goal.

12. You undoubtedly spend tons of money on internal corporate communications. Here’s a little pop quiz you can use to see if it’s working. Ask the next 10 employees you happen to bump into to write down the company’ s top 3 business priorities. If the answers are all exactly the same, give us a call; we’d love to congratulate you (for real.) If they aren’t, you had better get busy, because as former NFL head coach Jimmy Johnson once put it, “confused players aren’t very aggressive.

All right. We’ll make it a baker’s dozen.

The next time one of your employees does something they didn’t have to do, purely out of a sense of commitment to the team or the organization, write ’em a note. Yes, get a note card, and a pen, and write it out by hand, even if your handwriting is lousy. Put the note in the envelope with their next paycheck. Make this a habit.

Pierre Chandon

Pierre Chandon Professor of Marketing at INSEAD France completed a study with four other US based Marketing professors on the theme of ‘When Does the past repeat itself? The Role of Self-Prediction and Norms.”

I found the findings from the study to be very interesting and the concepts in human behavior in normative & non-normative activities to be enlightening.

“Everybody becomes more average” is supported by the study and it would seem that there is a regression towards the norm.

Professor Chandon has also written a few articles on obesity and eating habits.I recommend you to read his papers. Understanding how much we are ‘mindless’ most of the time in our behavior is mind blowing.

Only a month ago, while discussing with a group of supermarket owners, I insisted with them in creating in their customers the pattern of behavior which will bring them back to shop at their respective stores. These habits once acquired become hard to break.

“What we know is that some habits are very hard to break. Anyone who has tried to lose weight or tried to change a habit knows it’s very difficult. So we’re interested in what can we do to make people change their habits,” Chandon says. “And one very simple thing is to ask people if they’re going to do it again next month. This has a very strong impact on whether people repeat what they normally do, or do what they think they should do.”

The study covered “normative” activities such as exercising, and non normative ones, such as grocery shopping. “When we ask people to predict whether or not they’re going to go grocery shopping, there’s really no norm about how often you should go grocery shopping. Just by asking people that question reminds people what they have normally done in the past and, as a result, they’re more likely to repeat it in the future.” So where there is ‘no ideal behaviour’ as is the case with grocery shopping, asking people to predict their future actions increases the likelihood that they will repeat their past behaviour. ( INSEAD: Assistant Professor of Marketing Pierre Chandon)

Robert Herbold

“Seduced by Success” written by Robert J. Herbold offers interesting insights in maintaining your business on course and ever renewed.

He has been the Chief Operating officer of Microsoft and an executive of Procter and Gamble.

A summary of the 9 Traps to identify:

1. Neglect: Sticking with yesterday’s business model

2. Pride: Allowing your products to become outdated

3. Boredom: Clinging to succesful branding after it becomes stale and dull

4. Complexity: Ignoring your business processes as they become cumbersome and complicated

5. Bloat: Rationalising your los of speed and agility

6. Mediocrity: Condoning poor performance and letting your star employees languish

7. Lethargy: Getting lulled into a culture of comfort, casualness and confidence

8. Timidity: Not confronting turf wars, infighting and obstructionists

9. Confusion: Unwittingly providing schizophrenic communications

I found the stories developed in the book most interesting.Of particular interest is the story of Sony as opposed to Apple ‘s IPOD.

YKK?

If YKK was mentioned what would you have thought? Hmmm…YKK a zipper…You are right it is perhaps the biggest brand name of a zipper. The association of the zipper to Dr. YKK is so creative. The creative Dr. YKK is known as the world mind unzipper.

I had the immense pleasure to have met him a couple years ago in Mauritius and Malaysia and to listen to his seminars. All along the years since, we kept in touch with each other all so often. Now YKK has embarked in a new adventure: he has decided recently to continue his career in Sydney Australia.

Dr.YKK (Kam Keong Yew, Ph.D) is an acknowledged Distinguished Talent on creativity and a former creativity adviser to Lego. He has been described as an energetic speaker, a provocative mind unzipper, an entertaining laughter guru, a masterful story-teller and bestselling author all rolled into one. This together with his wide international exposure and diverse work experience enable him to connect well with his audience.

Creative Thinking

Most entreprises waste untapped potentials which may be released by the practive of creative thinking.Using skillfully designed yet simple exercises with profound impacts, Dr.YKK interaction with his audience allow them to discover their latent creative thinking skills. The powerful de-briefing opens their minds to the practical application of their newly re-discovered skills in idea generation and solution finding. Be warned that your mind once stretched may never return to its original dimensions! The elasticity, the stretching skills once acquired stays.

Business Innovations

Supported by latest stories and surveys of global business innovations, Dr.YKK provides convincing evidence that the most profitable business in the world is selling imagination. He shares principles, provides practical techniques and involved his participants on the what, why and how of business innovations. You leave the session with a new found confidence and skills of being able to stand out from your competition. With the right processes in place World Class entreprises are continously benefiting from business innovations brought by their own staff at all levels. Higher motivation of the staff and a spirit of belonging to the company are thus experienced. The payback of creating the culture of business innovation exceed many folds the investment.

Creative Strategies

Many multinational corporations have found Dr.YKK’s pre-strategy planning session as an invaluable exercise in mind opening and out-of-the-box thinking. It acts like a catalyst that elevates their corporate planning to a whole new level. The managers become more enthusiastic and better equipped to face the challenges ahead.

He is available for keynote speeches, workshops and facilitation sessions.

Bienfait de Blogger

« Tout le monde devrait écrire » est le titre d’un livre de Georges Picard.

J’ai trouvé que le commentaire de Pascale Arguedas sur le livre de Georges Picard a fait écho à ma pensée. Ecrire mon blog m’a permis de cristalliser mes idées. L’écriture, chaque fois, me demande de mettre en une forme réfléchie et congruente ma pensée. Dans mon exercice de publication, je suis tenu à une rigueur et je suis obligé de choisir dans les nuances et la pondération. La relecture du mon texte me met et me remet dans les souliers du lecteur éventuel de mon blog. Ce qui m’exige un esprit critique à l’égard de mon texte. Un travail de contrôle de l’exactitude de mes propos, et le choix du style utilisé m’ont aidé à construire peu à peu et perfectionner mon écriture.

Voila un des bienfaits de blogger.

Je livre à votre réflexion les propos suivants de Georges Picard :

« […] l’écriture acharnée qui force à réfléchir reste l’une des armes les plus solides contre la sauvagerie et l’impuissance. Chacun avec ses moyens peut facilement s’en emparer. » Écrire devrait donc être une vocation désintéressée…

« Pour être au clair avec soi-même, pour savoir de quoi sa propre pensée est réellement capable, l’épreuve de l’écriture paraît cruciale. Peut-être publie-t-on trop, mais il n’est pas sûr que l’on écrive suffisamment. Tout le monde devrait écrire pour soi dans la concentration et la solitude »

« Aujourd’hui, la littérature est entrée en résistance contre un ennemi qui n’a pas de visage, qui n’a que l’identité vague et grise de l’indifférence. Cela ne doit pas décourager la passion d’écriture, au contraire. C’est justement parce qu’il n’y a rien à attendre du médiatique et du social en général, qu’écrire ressemble de mieux en mieux à une vocation désintéressée. »

Management: running the business without you.Bill Bartmann

It is relatively easy to run a business where you are the owner, the operator, the controller, the marketer in the nutshell: the one man show. You do not need to possess any managerial skill as you only have to manage yourself. Your growth and consequently potential will be limited to what you personally can do.

An entrepreneur at least a successful one, I dare say is someone who, above all have the skill to run a business beyond his personal presence. Thus the entrepreneur has to develop his skill of leading & managing people, resources and understand the environment. You are called a manager only when you have people reporting to you.

I have been recently listening to Bill Bartmann, who is recognized as one of the best entrepreneurs of the US by NASDAQ some years ago. Learning from his mistakes, has been his greatest success. It is worth learning the secrets that took Bill Bartmann from a failure to a success, from bankrupt to a billionaire. You will thus learn real-world entrepreneurship tactics that actually work.

In short, entrepreneurs essentially should address the following:

Investment – Raise the money you need to grow fast
Recruitment – Attract top talent with creative compensation
Management – Get your business to run without you
Exit Strategy –
Cash-out wealthier than you thought possible.